Terrorism, Brussels, etc … Think Before you Hunt

Look at the swamps created by the differential of exterminability and mournability between Muslims and non-Muslims.

It is in those and similar dips in the affective tectonic plates in which we are all embedded where some of the emotional propellors of Islamic terrorism grows.

Those affects do not necessarily lead to terrorism but Islamic terrorism does not grow without them. Some people like to use the cliché ‘not all Muslims are terrorists’ to comfort themselves as if on one hand there’re the crazy terrorists and on the other there’re the Muslims who don’t feel anything.

This is not the case. Many, indeed most, Muslims feel the effect of this differential in exterminability. Who would come to realize that they, as a racialized collectivity, are considered more expendable than others and not feel it?

Most Muslims are depressed by this, or outraged, or humiliated, or angry, or stunned or made resentful, or all of the above. And sure, it does not lead all of them to become terrorists. But please don’t make it out as if all is fine for those ‘peace-loving majority’.

Muslims might block those feelings or they might process them. They might process them in a secular way, they might process them poetically or politically, in a masculine or in a feminine way, they might process them silently, publicly and collectively, or by screaming alone in the night. But they all process them. And than there’s the proverbial ‘tiny minority’ that processes them in a militarist combative way. If the latter is all you see, you’re not seeing much.

If you cannot see those affective swamps and what is allowed to fester in them, if you cannot see how it is drowning all of us in a destructive culture of exterminability, a culture of selective indifference to the killing and death of some, you are not seeing much at all.

Yet it is a collective responsibility, particularly for those of us living in the West, to see and discuss and understand those swamps and their effects. If for nothing other than the fact that it is not the Muslims who have created them, it is the West. It is years of colonial impunity in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where Muslims began to be considered exterminable and disposable and where the modern indifference to their extermination grew. And do we need to mention Palestine and the Israeli monstrosity where exterminability is continually and increasingly flirting with extermination?

In the early colonial era each colonised Muslim community had to deal with its own exterminability alone. As the world grew to be more global and interconnected, today every Muslim death is for most Muslims a global event. There was and there continue to be a politics around whether those deaths should be experienced as ‘Muslim deaths’, or as the death of colonized people, or as the death of victims of capitalism. But there is no doubt today that those deaths are primarily experienced as Muslim deaths. And likewise, there is no doubt that those who identify even mildly as Muslims don’t share the western indifference to those deaths.

Caring or experiencing indifference is not simply a matter of will. Speaking for myself, I am more likely to be in a cafe in Paris or an airport departure lounge in Brussel and be the victim of an Islamic terrorist, than I am likely to be somewhere in Iraq or Syria and get killed by a drone. That is the truth for most of us in the West. But not all of us. And we need to recognise that more and more people living among us do not feel affectively or practically as disconnected from the drone exploding in Afghanistan or Libya or Iraq. There are more and more people who live and work and intermingle with us who do think that it could be them. They don’t all think it with the same intensity or with the same sophistication or capacity for detachment. But they think it.

We live in a world of colonially produced but intermingling plurality of cultures and intensities of mournability. Until the nefarious effect of this colonialism comes to an end we could at least try and recognize and minimize the effect of this differential as opposed to letting the culture of exterminability thrive on its back. Being aware and mindful of this differential and of its effects is one step to take along this road.

So, let’s go hunting Islamic terrorists. I don’t want to die next time I am in Paris, London, Beirut, New York or Boston. And I am there a lot. I have an interest in the hunt and its success. And it is because I have an interest that I’d rather the hunters think a bit more than they appear to be at present.

Ghassan Hage is Future Gen­er­a­tion Pro­fessor of Anthro­pology and Social The­ory at the Uni­ver­sity of Mel­bourne.

Ghassan Hage

Ghassan Hage is Pro­fessor of Anthro­pology and Social The­ory at the Uni­ver­sity of Mel­bourne. Ghassan is the author of, amongst others, White Nation (1998) and Against Para­noid Nation­al­ism (2003). View all posts by Ghassan Hage →

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1 comment for “Terrorism, Brussels, etc … Think Before you Hunt”

eric d. meyer

30 March 2016 at 1:45 am

Certainly Muslim disproportionately feel the enormous pressure of discrimination and injustice weighing down upon them from the West, whether as religious prejudice racism classism sexism or whatever. Certainly the international war on terror has been used as a pretext to target and exterminate Muslim populations considered expendable or undesirable by the West, those who don’t buy into the globalist capitalist etc. world-system. And certainly the so-called post-colonial postmodern etc. world-system is not free of the vestiges of 19th and 20th Century Western colonialism and its Orientalist biases, which persist in the Western European/non-Western, Judeo-Christian/Muslim, North/South divides that are blatantly evident in the 21st Century world disorder. But as Kofi Annan once said, you can’t go on blaming Western European colonialism for everything forever. You also have to face up to your own problems, especially the ones you create for yourselves. And I can’t help but think that many of the Muslim world’s problems stem from Muslim extremist fundamentalism and the Islamist jihadi mentality, which Muslims themselves must be willing to denounce and condemn, if nothing else simply to stop the Western counter-terrorist apparatus from exploiting it and the Sunni/Shiite divide to set Muslims against each other and keep them killing each other—with, of course, the assistance of terrorist training and weapons of mass destruction provided by the West and the US. And I can’t help thinking that there’s a major flaw in the Muslim religion and the Muslim scriptures, the Qur’an and the hadith etc., which, even more than the Hebrew Bible and midrash which provide support for Zionist fundamentalist claims to the State of Israel, or the Christian Bible which provides a pretext for crusades and holy wars in the Holy Land, provides support for Wahabi/Salafist (Sunni) Islamist extremist jihad and its Shiite equivalents against not only infidels and non-believers, but against even apostates within Islam itself, under the guise of a self-righteous holy war. And I also can’t help but thinking that among the three Abrahamic religions, it is Islam which most strongly emphasizes the Abrahamic sacrifice of Ishmael/Isaac as a prerequisite of Muslim faith and thus provides sanction for Muslim suicide bombing and Islamist jihadi massacres, under the guise of self-sacrificial martyrdom. And so maybe rather than going out hunting Muslim civilians or Islamist terrorists under the bannerheads of the international war on terror, maybe we all, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, could privately and publicly critique those elements of our spiritual and religious heritage that provide justification for ‘sacred violence’ as a self-sacrificial mission proclaimed by whatever false god we continue to worship: Jehovah, Yahweh, or Allah. Who is not, I continue to believe, the god of Jesus Christ, called Abba, Father, who proclaimed: Love thy enemy as thyself, turn the other cheek, and never respond to terrorist violence with more terrorist violence. And who therefore could have brought this whole stupid self-perpetuating religious war between Muslims, Christians, and Jews to a stop before it even started, two thousand years ago, if anybody had really listened to him, instead of scourging stoning and crucifying him and nailing him to the bloody cross …